Picking Your Battles

When I'm around you, I kind of feel like I'm on drugs. Not that I do drugs. Unless you do drugs, in which case I do them all the time. All of them. 

--Scott Pilgrim

My girlfriend sent me a link to an article on how to be a good boyfriend.  Based on the prose and arguments it made, it could have been written by someone in high school.  Then she said she wants more from me, but she doesn't want to tell me what she wants;  I have to guess.  That is when this whole thing became very familiar to me.  I've been here before**, and more than once.

I know this thing that girls do is cute and makes for good material for stand up comedians, but must we tolerate it with smiling faces?  Do we have to sit back and shrug and declare that's just how girls work?  Submit to half of the world's populate being out of touch with reality or common sense?

Yes.

At least, I am.  I don't care what you do.  I don't care about my opinions on how anything should work anymore.  It is too tiring and too impossible.  There are only three--well, four--things ...oh shit five.  Ok there are only five things that I can remember off the top of my head that I can do for hours upon hours, even forgetting to eat:  programming, level editing, playing some $5 internet game called terraria, girls, and messing around with legos.  Only one of those things pays well.

I never really thought about my programming career as a thing.  Certainly not as a thing that had to be planned out and cared for.  I just looked at the world with big eyes and said "let me write!"  Seems like we need a different approach.  From my own perspective, I need to improve my people skills, and I need to do massive amounts of coding.

People skills are starting to improve.  Just today, I came across a ticket that infuriated me.  These "tickets" I'm referring to are used to track defects in our software.  Naturally, we have thousands of them flying around constantly (many of which could be avoided by testing code and other sound engineering practices).  In theory, an entire team should have, maybe, 10 of these, if its a bad week.  My team typically has about 100 assigned to them (down from 400), and between the tickets assigned to us, AND the tickets we assigned to other teams, for customer facing issues, that are being ignored for more than three months (I am SO not kidding), we are pretty busy.  There are some properties of tickets, like "estimated completion date" and "sla" that, since my first day, I've never even known how to edit, because they are so unimportant compared to the actual customer pain caused by these problems*.  To this day I actually have no idea at all where the estimated completion date comes from, except to say that it has no bearing whatsoever on when the ticket will actually be solved.  Especially when people ignore the tickets assigned to them.  Well.  Someone in another department--one of ones that cause us a lot of operational pain--decided they were going to start caring about this shit.  We have assigned tickets to them because their fucking software sucks, and they have apparently just assigned those tickets back to us, because, well, the tickets were already beyond their "estimated completion date."  Some stupid fucking bitch actually wrote "it is our policy not to accept tickets into our queue that are already past the" fucking whatever.  I stood at my computer,  arm muscles clenched, fingers poised over the keyboard, as every neuron in my brain poured over possible responses, my entire being dedicated to a fast and furious search algorithm in search of the most sarcastic, viscerally bitter and effective response.  I was probably like that for ten minutes.  After a while I had mostly settled on "It is [my team name]'s policy not to accept tickets into our queue that were assigned back for bullshit like estimated completion date."  This wasn't good enough though--all this did was call her out.  To truly respond appropriately, I knew I would have to fuck up their metrics.  That bitch assigned the ticket back to us for a reason, and that reason was that some fuckup of a manager had decided that they wanted to start measuring random shit, and was holding their teams accountable to metrics that mean nothing, all the while we have customers who ordered shit three months ago and aren't getting it.  I could assign them a shitload of tickets that were past their date.  I began exploring all of the spectacular responses I could make--especially, oh 'specially given the fact that I wanted to leave the company anyway.  And then I walked away.

As far as doing massive amounts of coding, that plan is still forming.





*I can tell you how to make an order that will get stuck in our system.  Not sure why you would bother though...they no longer act as poison pills that shut down the entire pipeline...just sort of inconvenience someone like me for a day.  So I guess actually I'm not going to tell you.

**This one time, my then-girlfriend told me that she was very mad at me and didn't know why.  And I know I say this all the time, but I'm really not making this up.